by Bishop Bill Gohl
I feel a great deal of gratitude for strong prayer partnership, too. When I slip unannounced into the pews of our congregations, and I hear Bishop Eaton's and my names remembered at the altar, I am encouraged. Your prayer is powerful. In the hardest times of this ministry, that prayer partnership has been nourishing and sustaining. Thank you, thank you, thank you – please, continue to pray for me even as I pray for you.
I am profoundly grateful for our synod staff – they have done and continue to do yeoman's duty with good humor and a sacrificial commitment to Christ and this Church. Collectively, we're living into what it means to be leaner and more focused. Mindful that we are not able to provide the level of support and partnership we could when the staff was larger, we often marvel at the Spirit-led partnership of our Synod Council, our Mission Teams and the patience of our constituent partners. We are finding solutions together instead of making the excuse, "It was better when..."
While it often seems I am "everywhere," what makes my ministry possible is the support, love and patience of my wife Arwyn and my children Saliese, David, Andrew and Joyanne. They share me and my time generously with this synod, and they protect family time as being a gift from God for us.
And I want you to hear me say, I thank God for you, our congregations and our shared ministries – no matter the shape, size or location. Week after week, we are making Christ known, through worship, learning fellowship and service; I am deeply grateful for your faithfulness.
With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love ... My word of struggle is deeply personal: after nearly two years, I still am trying to strike a balance. While the demands of this office are many, I never lose sight of my top priority: being available to our rostered ministers, congregations and shared ministries of our synod. Moving as nimbly as I can from Frostburg to Ocean City, Newark to Fulton, I find myself not unlike Paul, mindful that the good I wish to do, I sometimes fail to do. While I want to be fully engaged and present when I am with you, life happens – at home and across our synod – and its distracting! For these times when I have sinned in thought, word and deed by what I have done and by what I have left undone, I ask forgiveness. I am grateful for the accountability and support of my spiritual director, coach, my pastor and mutual ministry team, friends and colleagues. They remind me that my first call is as a baptized child of God.
Still, if you had told me two years ago that I would find myself on the front lines with you confronting racism, advocating for our neighbors, witnessing to care for creation, naming the opioid pandemic as a crisis among us, and publicly calling our neighbors to prayer; I would have thought you delusional. It is a sacred privilege to stand with you as we have more publicly sought to love our neighbors as ourselves. I leverage my privilege as bishop to amplify the voices of the oppressed, marginalized and forgotten often hidden among us.
The two hardest pieces of being your bishop often leave me weary: The first is congregations and rostered ministers in strained or conflicted relationships. Pastors, deacons and lay people want to serve Christ and Church, but relationships are often messy and sometimes when those relationships deteriorate and those ministry partnerships don't end well. The costs of such endings are not primarily measured in dollars, but in the loss of trust and faith. Paul's admonition to humility, gentleness, patience and bearing with one another in love is hard work, entrusted to all of us.
The second is a harder still: the heart-wrenching hours that are consumed by accusations of rostered minister misconduct. Inevitably, whether the accusation is substantiated or not, the process exacts a toll on the congregation, rostered minister, synod staff and bishop. Let me be clear, I have not ever initiated an allegation of misconduct! However, once an accusation or report is made to our synod office, I am obligated to investigate it fully and pursue the process. Truth-telling and transparency, though often painful, are our guiding principles so that genuine healing can be affected.
Making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace ... My challenging word for our church is "change."
We must continue to live within our means; and still, just like in cooperative and parish ministries, we cannot do more with less. Whether it's turning over what was once staff leadership to volunteers; or letting something we value, but not core to our mission, lie fallow for a season; or bearing the increasing costs of doing ministry in new ways that make us rethink what it means to be Church, the Great Commission must be lived out. Needs are changing and the usual places of support don’t always materialize the way they once did. Change is occurring at an unprecedented pace. Please hear me, beloved sisters and brothers, change is unavoidable.
Having walked with a number of congregations through closing or consolidation, I've learned this: unless you are prepared to give up something you value, you will never be able to truly change at all. You'll be forever in the control of the things you can't give up. Let me say that one more time: unless you are prepared to give up something you value, you will never be able to truly change at all. You'll be forever in the control of the things you can't give up. In some cases, when buildings are so large and costly that they threaten to swallow up any chance of doing meaningful ministry; or the congregation's strength and size have become diminished by a whole host of factors including age, population changes, financial challenges and ongoing conflict, there is a faithfulness to concluding a ministry so that new ministry can happen. It's tempting to spend off every last dollar and let the last person turn off the lights on their way out. But there are other faithful ways forward, too. Congregations like Emmanuel and Sts. Stephen & James, Baltimore in their closing, Spirit of Life and Zion, Wilmington in their consolidating, and Our Saviour, Lansdowne in their scattering, sacrificed something of themselves for the larger good of us all. They generously shared their gifts for the sake of old partnerships and new ministries. The unity of the church is manifested in a concern for the common good, not just surviving to see another Christmas or Easter.
I am heartened by the number of congregations who are participating in cooperative mission conversations. We see partnership for the sake of the gospel, rather than "franchise competition." Slowly, but faithfully, we are stepping up to the challenges of discipling one another and transferring leadership from one generation to the next. We don't really resist change, we resist being changed; convinced that our way is the best way. But friends, it's not to be about us and how we "like" "our" church to be, it's supposed to be about Jesus and what he is calling God's church to be. Faithfulness is not the opposite of change, it is the embodiment of it.
There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all ... Let me close with a word of Hope: Many of our congregations and ministry partners see ourselves as part of something larger than ourselves and embrace this partnership we share. More and more our congregations see mission support not as "paying dues," nor the easy "go to" cut to make our congregation budgets balance. More and more, across this corner of the Church that we stewards together, we are embracing what this means to be "our synod" with ministries like Campus Ministry, Prison Ministry, Seminarian and Missionary support, Outdoor Ministry, Youth and Family Ministry – being church together in ways that individually, we could not fully fund or do on our own. In the special offering we collected for the Caribbean Synod's recovery, one congregation sent $27 and another sent nearly $22,000! Together with many other gifts from over 100 congregations, we provided over $85,000 to help our neighbors meet their most basic needs. One Spirit that binds us together in brokering hope!
In the new congregations we are starting and supporting together, we are giving witness to a modern Pentecost moment! The Spirit is gifting us to speak the love of Jesus in communities that we’ve not accompanied before: siblings from Myanmar and West Africa, LGBTQIA families and the Pan-Asian diaspora, in geographies we've only known through recovery work like Crisfield. English, German and Estonian language worship is being enhanced by new languages and tongues like Spanish, Tamil, Liberian, French, Swahili, Burmese, Tagalog, Korean, and more. On my children, the Scriptures witness, on them all I have poured my Spirit! Dreams are being dreamt, prophets are prophesying and people are seeing visions of vitality and hope unlike we've known in generations. Tongues of fire are resting in unexpected places – large and small – encouraging us to know that we are one body, called to the one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. If our hope is in Jesus – not programs, gimmicks and fads, then our hope does not, will not and cannot disappoint us.
With real gratitude, challenges to meet together; with struggles still to overcome, anchored by an irrepressible hope in this faith we share, I submit my second annual report to this Assembly. Thank you.